Let’s meet for tacos. I drag an art pal along and we meet up with a friend who wants me to paint a particular spot nearby. The tacos are delicious but they are actually giant burgers and these beers are absolutely perfect. Another pal shows up and another round ensues. We leave the funny tacos and head out to paint this spot for my friend. We drive a convoluted route through a college campus to a packed parking lot and wander off past the college kids all over the sandstone bluffs in search of this view. Once we find it, we scratch an X and we return to the lot and offload my paint pack with our latecomer taco pal and drive all the way back around to the non-college campus lot and traverse across these same sandstone bluffs back to our X marks the spot by a different route and wonder where our latecomer taco pal with the pack is at. He’s got my whole studio in that thing. All I can do is whistle in the breeze and enjoy the view. Phone calls are made. I’m confused, but that is typical. Decisive planning on road trips is just not my thing. Did I mention my friend and his pal are lawyers? Not that that matters much, but I don’t generally question lawyers. Especially lawyers with bags full of ice cold beers. This is gonna work out fine. Finally the gear arrives and I set to work on this painting over the banter of surf tales going back generations and harmonica tunes going back even further. These guys are good at this shooting-the-breeze game and it quickly becomes apparent that they’ve both seen some wild things here. Not all of it friendly. But some of it magically beautiful too. The sun sets and we wander back to the cars and set off in search of tacos and beers. We head over to a bar and grill near a busy pier, where parking does not exist at this hour except for lawyers who’ve seen some things and know that they can park in the customer only surf shop lot after hours right behind the restaurant row and walk straight into the bar like they own the place and since I don’t question lawyers in bars I follow right behind as we walk through dishwasher steam clouds and down a narrow hallway dodging piles of dirty dishes with long legs when a sweaty faced kid appears from a doorway and stops in his tracks before being steamrolled by three musketeers marching through his kitchen uninvited and says as we pass by,

“Who ARE you guys?”

And I don’t even know. And I’m not gonna start asking questions now. And again the tacos were delicious but they were actually pizzas and the beers were once again absolutely perfect.